Eleanor Rigby

by Douglas Coupland

  “Such as …”

  “Such as liver. Or kidney.”

  “Go on.”

  “’Hi—before I was sautéed in onions, I spent my life refining impurities from a cow’s bloodstream.’”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “I include sweetbreads and tripe on that list.”

  “What is a sweetbread?”

  “A thymus gland.”

  “Tripe?”

  “Stomach.”

  “Okay. Why don’t we have Wiener schnitzel for dinner? When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”

  Romans. He’d quickly gotten to the point. “Rainer, you want to discuss our business right away?”

  “No. No—I didn’t intend for that coincidence. But the fact that you came all this way on the basis of a few phone calls and a jpeg is tantalizing.”

  “I think I need to eat.”

  “Of course. And you must tell me about your German prison adventure.”

  “Where to begin?”

  “Let’s begin when you first found the piece of fuel from the Soviet satellite.”

  “Very well. It was a week ago Thursday—”

  My story took us right through dinner, and I pride myself that it wasn’t the least bit dull. I felt cosmopolitan. I thought that this must be how Leslie feels every day of her life, how beautiful people must go through existence, their every word a pastry for the starved. Rainer had also done his homework. He knew about William and his company, and he was able to help me decode the strange first six hours in Frankfurt during which there seemed to be no logic in what people were and weren’t asking me.

  We were near the end of our schnitzels when I realized we were running out of time to discuss Klaus Kertesz. Rainer saw this in my face and said, “It’s perhaps better if we wait until tomorrow to discuss our official business, Miss Dunn.”

  “Liz.” I was glad he felt this too. I was bagged.

  “Liz. Come down to our police station and we can work more efficiently. Can you wait until then?”

  “Of course.”

  The rest of the dinner was spent discussing Vienna. Throughout it all, Rainer was the perfect host, and not once did he make me feel I was torturing him with my presence.

  Around eleven, we said good night in the lobby. I would come to the station the next morning at eleven.

  Just before leaving, Rainer asked me, “Liz—do you ever buy lottery tickets?”

  “What a strange question. Why, are you selling them?”

  “No. I’m curious. Do you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “And why not?”

  “Nobody’s ever asked me that, but I have a definite opinion on the matter. Imagine, Rainer, if I’d bought a ticket and then had all of the numbers except for one. A failure that large I couldn’t begin to imagine. Why open your door to that kind of grief, let alone pay money to have it happen to you?”

  “There we have it. Good night, Liz.”

  “Good night, Rainer.”

  I am beyond pooped.

  And, the hotel left cookies by my bedside.

  Good night.

  * * *

  Rainer’s office was drab in a generic bureaucratic way that even curlicued Vienna was powerless to change. It had nicotine-stained panelled walls in blue and grey and green. The office’s cubicles were partitioned by filmy glass panes. The absence of fabric-panelled wall partitions and empty team-speak pep posters saved the precinct from resembling Landover Communication Systems. And cigarette smoke. Now that I think about it, it’s not just the all-pervasiveness of cookies in Vienna that’s weird, it’s the pervasiveness of cigarettes. It’s like seeing spittoons on every corner. What next—scarlet letters?

  I also caused a small sensation when I entered Rainer’s office, along the lines of, Die Frau who upgefucked the entire Frankfurt Flugplatz vier days ago.

  “Liz, please. In here.” Rainer motioned me in. On his desk was a coffee and, yes, another cookie.

  “Rainer, what is it with Vienna and cookies?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everywhere I go here, people are giving me cookies. Is it something you people do to loosen the subconscious or something?”

  “Liz, a small amount of sugar is surely good for the release of ideas and memories.”

  “So it’s a plot, then.”

  “A plot?”

  I could see that staff members were pretending not to gawk at me from outside the windows.

  “Ignore my colleagues,” said Rainer. “You are a celebrity. We do not see them often.” From a desk drawer he pulled a cheap, legal-seeming black vinyl photo album, but he appeared reluctant to open it.

  “Is that for me to look at?” I asked.

  “Yes. But not yet.” He lit a cigarette and said, “Liz, last night was social, and a very enjoyable evening, but we chose not to probe into the matter of Rome, and of Herr Kertesz.”

  “That was polite of you. Thank you. Yes, it was a nice evening.”

  “Liz, you flew here to meet with me. I can only infer some deep connection between you and Herr Kertesz.”

  “Klaus Kertesz? Yes.”

  “Can I ask you now—my office is soundproof—to tell me what I need to know about this man—as regards you?”

  What was I to say? This was the moment he’d been waiting for. My arms clenched across my chest, protecting my rib cage. I spotted sky-blue background on the edge of the photo poking out from the vinyl album—the same blue that was on the jpeg of Klaus Kertesz that had started this whole odyssey.

  That sliver of blue was all I needed. I began huffing and puffing, quite against my will, an anxiety attack, my first, and I was no better than Scarlet Halley, five miles over Reykjavik. It occurs to me that, like Scarlet on the 747, and like Jeremy on my condo’s sofa, I’d finally found a place in which I felt secure enough to disintegrate—across from this stubbly Eurocratic man who looked like Václav Havel’s cellmate. Next, I began to blubber in the large, messy way I tried to avoid my entire life. I can think of nothing more repelling than me, in tears, making a scene in public, demanding attention, even if that was never the purpose of my tears.

  After I calmed down, Rainer passed me my cookie and topped up my coffee. “I assumed there was something there. Perhaps you could tell me what happened.”

  Boosted by mind-opening sucrose, I told Rainer about Rome, and about Jeremy, and I took almost an hour to do so. Upon finishing, I was wiped out, and Rainer said, “Why don’t I take you to lunch.”

  So we walked to a bistro, and he kept the discussion light, which at that moment suited me well. Vienna is a stunning city, a tourist’s dream, but in their numbers the tourists diminished the city’s charm. What would the pious citizens of other centuries have made of the thousands of sweaty, near-naked tourists now buzzing like mites in and out of their cathedrals?

  Once we were inside the bistro, Rainer’s mood changed. He said, “Maybe it would have been better if Vienna had been bombed in the war. Everything here is so monstrously old. Sometimes I’m jealous of the Germans—at least they were able to create something new.” He paused. “Sorry. What an awful thing to say. But I would very much like to see a UFO land and take half the city with it. Maybe the Chinese will do it someday.” He scanned a menu that he must have seen thousands of times during his career. “We happened to be big and middle-class first. All these people with not enough trouble in their lives creating new ways to create trouble.” He looked out the front window. “Let us eat.”

  We ordered lunch—onion soup with Gruyère, salad and steak, pommes frites—and, shortly after, it arrived.

  “So,” asked Rainer, “what shall we do about Herr Kertesz?”

  “Well, I think I’d like to meet him.”

  “I haven’t told you much about him.”

  “Even so.”

  He ate, said nothing, but I stopped eating and stared at him, and won the match. He said, “I suppose I cannot stop you.”

  “No, you can’t.
Tell me about him.”

  “Very well.”

  “Is he in jail?”

  “No.”

  “Is he a criminal?”

  “Not technically. Some petty theft when he was young, but nothing after twenty. If a man steals at twenty-five, he will steal at fifty. So, he is not a criminal. Not that way.”

  “How else, then?”

  Rainer poured us both some water. “He is what you would call a public nuisance. He is annoying, but technically, legally, he’s doing nothing wrong.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “He talks to himself on the street.”

  “I’ve been known to do that. On the phone you said assaults against women. That sounds pretty serious to me. What kind of assaults?”

  “Not sexual assaults.”

  This wasn’t what I was expecting to hear. “What? Okay—then what kind?”

  Rainer didn’t want to say what he said next, but he finally got it out. “Religious assaults.”

  “What?”

  “It has nothing to do with suggestive clothing or that strain of zealotry. Herr Kertesz selects women—though we have no idea how he selects them—and he decides that they need a … religious education.”

  “Is this some kind of Catholic Austrian thing?”

  “No. His family is Protestant, but he seems non-denominational.”

  “Is he trying to be Charles Manson?”

  “No.”

  “Is he poor, and scamming for money?”

  “Quite the opposite. Herr Kertesz’s family takes good care of him. He is also a dentist and successful.”

  “What does he do to the women he—confronts?”

  “He follows them around, and he asks them questions.”

  “Like …?”

  He made a face to tell me that he’d memorized Klaus Kertesz’s pickup lines. “Like, Your life is too easy. You’ve been tricked into not questioning your soul. Do you know this?”

  “And …?”

  “Unless you change quickly, your soul will freeze itself into one shape forever, and never thaw. You must know this. Have you thought about it?”

  “He sounds tame enough.”

  “Liz—imagine you’re just an ordinary woman trying to go from the office to the market to the house, having to deal with this—” He refrained from saying “idiot,” but I could tell that Klaus Kertesz was blighting Rainer’s days.

  “He’s a stalker, then.”

  “No. A stalker stalks. Herr Kertesz keeps to his own routine, but if he bumps into one of the women on his list, he acts.”

  “Is there any sort of ongoing type of woman he annoys?”

  “They tend to be his own age, and also, women at first do not mind, as he’s tall and very good-looking.”

  “Has he ever hassled men?”

  “No. We’ve questioned him several times. He says that men are all damned, and that there is no use trying to save them. He says only women can be saved, and that’s why there are slightly more women born than men—so that we, as humans, have hope. He’s statistical about it.”

  I asked, “But he’s never actually assaulted a woman?” What about me?

  “No. He’s a nuisance, but not an attacker. Or so we thought. But a month before I found you on Google, there was a woman here who became tired of Mr. Kertesz’s attentions. One night as she was walking home, Mr. Kertesz zoomed in to deliver his lecture. She performed some tae kwon do moves on him, and after this she filed a formal assault charge. This pleased me. We were glad because we finally had legal recourse. It was after our interview with him that he told us about you. I did not expect you to actually come here.”

  “That was almost three decades ago. What could I possibly say or do now that would make any legal difference—or any difference?”

  “Maybe nothing.”

  “But here I am, right now, sitting in front of you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Rainer, I guess we could have had this small conversation on the phone.”

  “Technically.”

  “I need to think a minute.”

  It was a relief to find out that Klaus wasn’t a rapist, but again, what happened to me? It was obvious Bayer wanted to give Kertesz enough rope to hang himself with, and if it got a rapist off the street, good. But how to digest the news that he was a religious—what? A religious … streetwalker? “Do any of these women ever stop and actually talk to him?”

  “As I said, he’s a handsome man, and he shows interest.”

  “But then what happens?”

  “I think the women realize that they’re not being treated as individual women, but only as a part of Herr Kertesz’s sickness. Something about his banter—is that the word?—something about his banter makes them suspicious.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “When you meet him, you’ll see for yourself.”

  What I expected to see was an older version of Jeremy, one who wasn’t sent to multiple rural British Columbian foster homes, who didn’t get MS and who didn’t have to put a brave face on the crappy hand life had dealt him. I said, “When we go back to your office, can you show me more of the photos you have of Klaus?”

  “No, I can show them to you right now.”

  From his leather attaché case he removed the vinyl photo album. He moved our mineral water glasses so that I could lay it flat on the table. I saw, laid out, maybe a dozen photos that showed Klaus over the past decade, aging well, the only noticeable change being the deepening creases in his brow and the creases running from the sides of his nose down to his jaw.

  “Does he resemble your Jeremy?”

  “Yes. He does. Almost entirely.”

  “How do the photos make you feel?”

  For the first time in my life I had the sensation that I was being analyzed, that something alien was tracking and monitoring my statements and behaviour, and assessing them on a scoresheet in categories I couldn’t imagine. How fitting that it be in Vienna.

  “How does it make me feel? It makes me feel stupid, for not remembering this Kertesz guy in the first place. It makes me sad, because I miss Jeremy so goddamn much. But most of all—you know what?—it makes me hopeful, because now I can see where Jeremy really came from.”

  “You’d still like to meet with Herr Kertesz, then?”

  “More than ever.”

  “You’re not afraid?”

  “Me? No.”

  “Perhaps not about physical assault, but about being …”

  “Being what?”

  Rainer shrugged. “Let down, perhaps?”

  “How?”

  “That maybe Herr Kertesz somehow makes smaller your memory of Jeremy.”

  “No. I can’t believe that. Not until I meet the man.” Though I confess I was feeling as though I’d just released the genie from the bottle.

  Rainer said to me, “And so you shall meet him.”

  I said, “Good.”

  At that moment the room flashed white and I almost passed out, hit suddenly with a blinding headache. After the headache’s first assault, I emerged into reality, dazed. Rainer was asking if I was okay. I looked in the mirror behind him and saw that I was chalk white. I’d never seen a body do that before, let alone mine.

  “Liz, I’ll take you back to your hotel right now.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “No, it’s probably MSG in the lunch.”

  “You’re probably right.” But of course with me, after Frankfurt, a headache is no longer just a headache.

  He taxied with me back to my hotel, where I slept until sunrise the next morning—today—this morning.

  I’m scheduled to meet Klaus Kertesz at three this afternoon, in a room at the City Hall. I can only say that I’m glad to have had my pen and paper to chip away at the time between then and … thirty minutes from now.

  Time to go.

  * * *

  In the cab to City Hall, my head felt like an oven that had been burning full tilt all day lon
g, with no food inside being cooked. I was a mess.

  Rainer met me at the front door and escorted me inside, where it was cool, across marble floors buffed by centuries of genteel shoe leather. We walked quickly to a room at the end of a long second-floor hallway. We stopped at a wooden door. The upper half was a rippled-glass window through which I could see a figure inside.

  Rainer asked me, “You’re okay here?”

  “Does he know it’s me?”

  “No.”

  “How did you convince him to come?”

  “It was more his family. They want the noise around him to go away.”

  I said I was ready, and I entered the room.

  There, more or less, was Jeremy, but much older. He’d been looking out the window, and when he turned around to see me, he gave me Jeremy’s winning smile.

  Klaus took one step toward me and said, “Well, good heavens. Queen Elizabeth. Hello.”

  * * *

  Just so it doesn’t look like I’m building toward a fireworks climax here, I’ll flatly say that Jeremy died on the morning of December 23—after just four months of living with me. I was in the bathroom counting his pills, and when I came out I found that his body had just sort of … stopped. His last words were a small joke, about an hour earlier: This mattress is both comfortable and affordably priced.

  There. I feel better having gotten that out of the way. His death came far more quickly than anyone had anticipated, but MS is a crapshoot.

  Just so nobody forgets, here’s a list of some of Jeremy’s symptoms:

  numbness

  pins and needles

  blurred vision

  inability to walk

  inability to tolerate heat

  muscle spasms

  swallowing problems

  loss of sensation

  loss of bladder and bowel control

  dementia

  Most people with MS have a plausibly normal life and can manage through the years okay. Jeremy was “primary progressive.” Primary progressives take a gut-kneading high-speed ride that can’t, won’t and is unable to stop once it begins. His final diet was mostly pills and IVs: prednisone, Betaseron and glatiramer acetate. Mostly the meds made him nauseous or confused, but every so often they triggered a good evening’s conversation. On the plus side, Jeremy never had mood swings or bouts of apathy, common in the late stages of MS. I was grateful for that. His humour and charm never once vanished.